If you have a GitHub account, you can fork this repository to make your own copy of it. If you don't, you can click on this link to download the entire repository to your computer and open it there using RStudio.
The past five years has seen an explosion in the popularity of women's basketball: athletes like Aja Wilson, Caitlin Clark, Breanna Stewart, Angel Reese and Paige Bueckers have become internationally famous. You might think that would coincide with an upsurge in girls playing high school basketball. That's not what the data says, and it suggests some potential stories that you could localize. We'll use high school participation data from the National Federation of High School Associations to compare basketball and volleyball, both nationally and on a state-by-state basis. Open the nfhs.Rmd notebook in this repository to get started.
Here's one more reason why this matters: with fewer American girls playing high school basketball, the percentage of international athletes playing college basketball in the U.S. is on the rise. But they aren't typical students.
In this repository you'll find a notebook called nba_two_minutes.Rmd. Click on it and we'll go through some of this data, make some charts, and talk about the possibilities.
In this exercise, we'll load data from women's college basketball games from the 2024-25 season, including information on which officials worked each game. Let's start with the wbb_officials.Rmd notebook. Then we'll turn towards foul calls, using the wbb_fouls.Rmd notebook.